Richard Farina chose the title "Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up
to Me" for his 1966 novel depicting the cultural revolution and
change in perspective of the early 60s generation in America. The
title implied that so much had changed that youth culture began to
view things from an entirely different vantage point. In this paper
we call this Cognitive Recalibration of Groups, and assert that
this construct supplies a missing piece in the puzzle as to how
cultural groups adapt to sustained change in their cultural
surroundings. We will argue that this recalibration explains how
individuals maintain their mental health, or at least avoid
breakdown, despite chronic conditions of resource loss and threat.
Our argument is very different from the individualistic idea of
reframing (Lazarus & Folkman, 1985), because we see cultural
recalibration as supporting the interpretations of an entire group
of people who share a social setting.
In this paper we will discuss how cultures are shaped to
communicate messages of safety and danger to participants of that
culture. We will argue that people evaluate these cultural
standards through both very rapid, virtually automatic responding,
and through slower, more deliberate evaluation. We will argue that
the fields of stress and trauma have not dealt to date with these
cultural issues, despite their being the fundamental bedrock of
people's stress evaluations. They are the background upon which all
stress reactions begin and are present throughout the entire stress
process. This has both theoretical and applied importance, as we
move to evaluate cultural differences, in particular where two
cultures are in conflict. We will shape our approach within
Conservation of Resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll, 1988; 1998; 2001),
which provides a stress template for understanding shared
evaluation of threat and loss by members of a culture or
setting.
COR Theory and the Primacy of Loss and Threat of Loss
COR theory is organized into many principles and I can only mention
several critical aspects of the theory here.The basic tenet of COR
theory is that individuals strive to obtain, retain, protect, and
foster those things that they value. These things they value, or
what allows them to get or retain what they value, are termed
resources. From this basic tenet, stress is predicted as occurring
when three conditions are present:
1) When an individual's resources are threatened with loss;
2) When an individual's resources are actually lost, or;
3) When an individual fails to gain sufficient resources following
significant resource investment.
COR theory is further defined by several principles and
corollaries. For our discussion, the critical aspect of this is the
primacy of loss. Specifically, resource loss is disproportionately
more salient than resource gain. This means people are impacted
much more negatively by resource loss than they are positively
impacted by resource gain. We know this causes people to be
sensitive to loss - to be risk avoidant.
For these processes to occur, however, there must exist a cultural
standard by which individuals who are raised in a culture
"understand" and define what is stressful to them. Otherwise each
person's stress would be unlike every other's. If this were really
true (as appraisal theorists suggest), we could have no common
literature; we would feel no tension as the story unfolded because
what was stressful to the story protagonists would be alien to us.
As Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto, and Norasakkunkit (1997) highlight,
"psychological processes and a cultural system are mutually
constitutive." Psychological tendencies and processes support an
individual's actions within their cultural context and how they
cognitively construe situations they encounter. Through these
cultural learning processes we acquire knowledge about how to act
and react. As I will argue, much of this knowledge is so deeply
learned that it is automatic.
The Automatic Nature of Initial Stress Reactions
Individual appraisal, and in particular what Lazarus and Folkman
(1985) termed secondary appraisal, takes place when individuals
assess how environmental circumstances threaten them and their
ability to adjust to or change these circumstances through the
resources they possess. To do this, individuals must compare their
circumstances to a certain standard they derive from the culture.
These standards must be ingrained because assessments are made
quickly, even if they can be revisited in a slower time frame.
Indeed, research suggests that initial secondary appraisals occur
in as little as 24 milliseconds (LeDoux, 1966). Although this may
be re-evaluated at leisure, these quick appraisals are an
indication of how deeply ingrained our cultural standards are, as
well as our ability to modulate our own emotions and behavior in
cultural context. Put another way, cultural calibration is the
unstated standard by which individual appraisals are
compared.
Evidence of the depth of the learning of cultural standards of
danger and safety, and the use of cultural calibration, also
appears in cognitive research by Bargh and Chartrand (1999). In
their work, they illustrate how most evaluation processes occur too
quickly (in milliseconds) and are too complex (containing thousands
of bits of information) to be organized within people's awareness.
Rather, this deeply learned material is reacted to almost
automatically. To illustrate this process we can look at a review
of the literature by Ambady and Rosenthal (1992).
In these studies, individuals made assessments of target
individuals' behavior after observations of various lengths of
time, ranging from 3 to 300 seconds. Ambady and Rosenthal found
that "thin slices" of behavioral observation (less than 30 seconds
observing the target) enabled evaluators to predict the target's
behavior no differently than longer periods of observation. In life
we are constantly confronted with such "thin slices" of observation
and we react emotionally and cognitively in a way that modulates
much of our behavior.
What does this mean for Palestinians and Israelis? Automatic
evaluation of the environment occurs because cultures and settings
tend to be stable. We evaluate our environments as having a certain
level of danger, comfort, safety and threat. We learn how well our
resources and those resources at our disposal fit these settings,
be they in Gaza City, Haifa, Jerusalem or Ramallah. This
information is then encoded and becomes rather automatic and
immediate. We no longer need to refer to who we are, who our
enemies are, the danger in going outside, the threat posed by
picking up a package in the street, or the path we take to work and
the fact of having work.
But what about when these truths become untruths, that is, when
core circumstances are markedly altered? At first, people ignore
the change as unlikely to reoccur. However, after several
occurrences of automatic thinking failing to produce desired
results, the conscious mind must again take control. So, the square
in Bethlehem is not a place where children should be allowed to
play, and the bus on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem is not a good option
for commuting. The religious Jew in the street is looked at
intently, as he may be a suicide bomber in disguise. Automatic
response cannot be allowed to continue. But this is so inefficient
a system that it becomes a cognitive burden, in itself stressful
(Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice; 1998). Hence,
recalibration occurs when the change has stabilized to the new
reality. Now the square and the bus become places of danger.
This cultural recalibration of groups is also critical to
adaptation for another reason. Specifically, as circumstances
worsen in some chronic pattern, if people continued to rely on
their original cultural standard they would become overwhelmed with
a sense of loss. Instead, people seem to hold to the old standard
until they are convinced, and the culture and setting inform them
convincingly, that things are worse and are likely to stay that
way. Indeed, during periods of prolonged hostility or economic
downturn, shared reality would suggest that people may adaptively
choose a baseline that is more negative than subjective. They do
this because it is functional to prepare for the new demands and
stressors that await them (i.e., the worst case scenario), and so
that they can make positive comparisons if things do not
deteriorate to the extent prepared for, "we were expecting a lot
worse." This cultural reframing and ultimate recalibration has not
been discussed or studied in stress literature, but I believe it is
the key to understanding how resilient most people are, even as
disaster, war and personal tragedy surround them.
This recalibration, and the depth by which it occurs, is captured
poignantly in the account given to me of a young woman who grew up
in the former Yugoslavia. She thought it was natural to run
zig-zag, darting back and forth as she ran, and not in a straight
line. It had never crossed her mind to just run straight! Zig-zag
was how everyone ran in the street to avoid snipers. She had
unlearned the natural rule that running in a straight line was the
fastest way to reach her goal. In Sarajevo it was no longer true
that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points.
The dead do not arrive. In Sarajevo, the laws of physics had
changed.
The Role of Political and Religious Leaders in the Recalibration
Process
What is, is, except when what is, is not. Religious and political
leaders often use their bully pulpit to redefine what is safety and
what is danger. This process is especially evoked when danger has
created a change in the fundamental rules of safety and culture
that previously allowed an automatic evaluation. September 11 was a
clear example. The continental US had been unassailable, a place of
perceived safety. In a few minutes, the attacks of September 11
destroyed the sense of safety that allowed for certain automatic
appraisals by members of the culture. President George W Bush
stepped in quickly, and some have argued not quickly enough, to
announce that the full resources of the US military and police were
being mobilized. He communicated that Americans were in some
continued danger, but that everything possible was being done to
limit that threat. In time, a reevaluation took place of relative
safety; this allowed for a return to a barely changed set of rules.
Americans were mostly safe; an attack on them as individuals was
unlikely, although an attack on someone, someplace, could
occur.
Political and religious leaders, however, often play a more
insidious role. Because people look to them as meaning-makers, they
can also create reality. Hence, since political and religious
threats are vague and outside of people's ability to appraise based
on their immediate surroundings, they must turn to others for
opinions. When Ehud Barak made his peace proposal to Yasser Arafat
in June 2000 at Camp David, there was a possible opportunity for
peace, even if not a perfect opportunity. But immediately leaders,
who tended to be from extremist groups in both Israel and
Palestine, declared the offer an ultimate threat to their side. Had
they just allowed negotiators to work further, perhaps a peace
arrangement was possible. Instead, a potential opportunity
precipitated the Al Aqsa Intifada. I am not making the argument
that Barak's offer was or wasn't a good one. My point is that, even
before citizens of either Israel or Palestine could make their own
assessments based on the facts, they were informed of the meaning
of those facts. The speed at which these leaders labeled that stage
of negotiations an imminent threat, the prologue to the worst
possible outcome, is suspect. That extremists on both sides took
this viewpoint even defies some logic, as one side or the other
must have been wrong if the end product of this offer was as
one-sided as each extreme camp argued.
Cognitive Recalibration of Groups as a Gateway to
Peace
Until this point we have discussed how cognitive recalibration of
groups is used in adjusting to sustained negative change in culture
or surroundings. However, this cognitive recalibration is also a
potential gateway to peace and helps explain how enemies can become
partners in peace.
An enemy is seen as such not only for perceived past wrongdoings,
but also because seeing them as enemies is adaptive. Knowing one's
enemies enables us to know how to remain safe from them or how to
limit the ways they might hurt us and those resources we value.
However, if peace is seen as possible, if it is convincing, then
these "truths" become lies. We may continue to hate our enemies for
what they have done in the past, but the very rejection of peace is
what threatens us. Peace with the enemy, instead of knowing the
enemy and reacting to them, becomes the gateway to safety.
Continuing to fight the enemy, to see them as enemies, is now what
threatens us, our children, our nation and our future.
But, if my thesis about the deep-seated nature of recalibration is
correct, then such recalibration from enemy to peace partner is
resisted. We refer back, automatically, to what we know. According
to COR theory, negative change that produces resource loss is
faster moving and more powerful than positive change and the
potential for sustained resource gain. Ironically, we can accept
the reality of war much more quickly than the reality of peace. Our
survival depends on the acceptance of war and threat as being
rather instantaneously digested and quickly automated. However, our
survival also depends on the acceptance of peace as being slow and
judged warily. Our will to survive is biologically encoded to
resist peace unless it is assured.
But peace is always tentative; it is hard to distinguish it from a
mere period of regrouping by the enemy who is only restoring
resources for another attack. Hence, for peace we must take a risk.
Not risking peace must be viewed as worse than continuing war. And
if this risk can be taken, cultural recalibration will follow. The
new reality of peace will forge new learning that at first will be
carefully judged and not automatic, but the adaptive nature of
adjustment will provide a segway for automatic learning of the new
reality. Running in a straight line is so much more adaptive that
it becomes as natural as...well, as peace.
References
Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable
automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462-479.
Farina, R. (1966). Been down so long it looks like up to me. New
York: Random House.
Hobfoll, S. E. (1988). The ecology of stress. New York: Hemisphere
Publishing Corporation.
Hobfoll, S. E. (1998). Stress, culture, and community. The
psychology and philosophy of stress. New York, N.Y.: Plenum.
Hobfoll, S. E. (2001). The influence of culture, community, and the
nested-self in the stress process: Advancing Conservation of
Resources Theory. Lead article. Applied Psychology, 50,
337-370.
Kitayama, S., Markus, H. R., Matsumoto, H., & Norasakkunkit, V.
(1997). Individual and collective processes in the construction of
the self: Self-enhancement in the United States and self-criticism
in Japan. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72,
1245-1267.
LeDoux. J. (1966). The emotional brain. New York: Simon and
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